The Core Committee formed by the Tamil Nadu Ayurvedic, Siddha and Unani Drugs Manufacturers Association (TASUDMA) with Dr Vijay A Mehta, as chairman, will submit its project report for the proposed Ayurvedic cluster, to the Department of Ayush by next month.

The department of Ayush has sanctioned Rs 10 crore to TASUDMA for setting up the consortium in five-acre land within the periphery of the state capital, said Dr Mehta, president of the Association. The cluster, expected to involve a total investment of Rs 16 crore, will be a public-private partnership to promote the Ayurvedic, Siddha and Unani products of Tamil Nadu within and outside of the country.

The project envisages facilities like quality control and testing laboratory, raw-drug bank and warehouse, clinical trial research centre, common marketing facilities, drug information centre, documentation and registration centre, herbal garden, library and packaging facilities.

Apart from Dr Mehta, the Core Committee includes S Lekshmi Narayanan, secretary of Tamil Nadu Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association; Dr Dharma Lingam, managing director of Dharma Ayurvedic College of Medical Sciences, Sriperumputhur and R Kannan, former drugs controller, Tamil Nadu. More members will be included and sub-committees will be formed later, it is learnt.

"For export of traditional medicines, clinical trial is necessary. We are planning to conduct the trials in the state-of-the-art laboratories of the Dharma Ayurvedic College and for which an agreement is going to be signed between our company and the college next Month," Dr Mehta who is also the director of Retort Pharmaceuticals Pvt Ltd, said in an interaction with Pharmabiz.

While speaking to Pharmabiz, the Core Committee chairman pointed out that they are planning to help the medicinal plant farmers, and to this effect the company will establish herbs collection centres in Coimbatore, Trichy, Madurai and in Chennai. Technical experts from leading Ayurvedic and Siddha pharma industries will provide technical know-how to the farmers for growing and treating the plants as well as for packaging materials with the help of the state medicinal plant board. Targeting this, the association has already started to form a data bank of suppliers.

"We are planning to promote the State as a global destination for all the major Indian System of Medicines and aiming to tap the vast potential in the export of ISM products. For this, we are going to register our organisation - TASUDMA - as a company next month. We will provide hands on help in all sectors to those ISM units which have a turnover of less than Rs 1 crore," president of TASUDMA clarified.

According sources from the Association of Indian Medicine manufacturers, there are more than 600 licensed manufacturers in Tamil Nadu and as per Schedule T of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, only 60 people have got the GMP license. To a query, Dr Mehta said all the manufacturers, whether GMP licensee or not, will be included in the Cluster.

The department of Ayush has identified ten places for starting ten Clusters in the country during this year and financial aids were sanctioned for six, one each in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Orissa, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. Cluster in Tamil Nadu is the sixth project of the department.

In the meeting that formed the Core Committee, Dr D R Lohar, director of Pharmacopoeia Lab of ISM, New Delhi; Dr S Sahu, deputy advisor to Ayush, G A Rajkumar, principal secretary to the Government of Tamil Nadu and Dr Thirunarayanan, secretary of Centre for Traditional Medicines and Research (CTMR) participated.